Tag: backstage

Tips for Creating a Successful Hack Week

March 16, 2023

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Hack Week has become something of Spotify lore. The beloved Discover Weekly playlist originated as a Hack Week idea, as did the ability to exclude select playlists from your Taste Profile. Now Spotify employees across functions worldwide look forward to the annual week where they put their regular work aside and collaborate on ideas that combine their passions, creativity, and skills. But developing Hack Week into the massive event that thousands of Spotify employees participate in annually is a feat in itself. 

According to Sarah Gänsicke and Nanci Veitch, Spotify Project Managers for R&D Communities, Hack Week started out as a “hot potato” in the early days of the company. “Each year it had the same skeleton—a kick-off event, a week of hacking, a fair, and local People’s Choice awards, but no repeatable format from a project management perspective,” Sarah shared. As Spotify matured, its teams turned Hack Week into a full-scale experience with a dedicated internal website, Skill Exchange portal (itself a Hack Week project), a developed visual identity, and an internal communications campaign to generate excitement and spread knowledge. “What has been great about the intentional scaling and effort behind the program is that it’s created a space for Hack Week to exist all year round rather than just being an engineering event that happens somehow every year,” said Nanci. Hack Week has also expanded to include non-R&D employees and now has “a long legacy throughout the company.” 

The benefits of Hack Week—providing opportunities to collaborate outside of one’s everyday team, giving employees flexibility to improve upon the product, offering ways to stretch beyond comfort zones—are endless. Nanci and Sarah offered five thoughtful tips to teams and companies looking to host their own hack weeks. 

  1. Create dedicated program management and identity. Though our core event has mostly stayed the same throughout the years, having a process that’s driven by a schedule and a set of principles has allowed us to make improvements to our communications, reduce barriers to entry, and increase the ease of participation for a diverse group of participants. For example, we developed a Hack Hub where employees can find hack ideas, explanations on how to join a team, and examples for a great hack. We also have a dedicated visual identity for Hack Week, which has helped to inspire and attract non-R&D employees. 
  2. Be inclusive. It’s not just who gets involved, but how you’re opening the door to them. We’ve enabled employees worldwide to join Hack Week by holding a mostly virtual event that abides by our distributed first principles. This year, we have hackers representing most of our global offices. We’ve also found ways to ensure Hack Week is not just for engineers. Members across many disciplines now engage in Hack Week. We encourage this by spotlighting nontraditional hacks and roles like user researchers, product designers, and music team members so they can see available opportunities. Encouragingly, we’ve found that individuals who join Hack Week are over 50% more likely to do it again. 
  3. Make the themes innovative and inspiring. This year’s theme is “The Future Is . . .” and it builds on a base of big-picture ideas inspired by recommendations from Spotify leaders. We recommend connecting the Hack Week theme back to your company’s core identity and priorities, but it’s also important to make the theme broad enough to allow for creative interpretation. With a powerful theme, people believe they’re setting their own mission. “We want to set the stage for hacks that push boundaries,” Nanci and Sarah noted. 
  4. Step out of your comfort zone. Hack Week is short, leaving many projects left unfinished—and that’s part of the beauty of the week. Goal-setting during Hack Week takes many forms but doesn’t necessarily include completion of the product. Hackers are encouraged to embrace the Spotify value of playfulness and utilize the week to get out of their day-to-day roles. We also recommend connecting and working with individuals outside of one’s direct realm. This really allows Hack Week to be a tool for interpersonal connection as well as a meaningful professional experience. 
  5. Don’t be afraid to bring in outside perspectives. This goes for participants and coordinators. Hack Week is a collaboration between Spotify’s dedicated Hack Week team and Say It Good Studio, a branding and communications studio that created and built Spotify’s Hack Week hub. “We treat Hack Week internally as if it’s an external campaign, keeping track of click-through rates and the like,” explained Sarah. “Having an external partner helps us avoid our biases, maintain good communication, and ensure it’s a more accessible process for everyone in the organization.”

Over the years, we’ve also brought inspirational figures into Hack Week to help our teams get excited about hacking. Notable artists involved in our internal campaign challenged hackers to “make space” ahead of Hack Week 2021 and “make the planet cooler” during Hack Week 2022. 

Like any good project, there’s always room for improvement. “One challenge that we’re still working through is that it’s hard to follow hacks from Hack Week to reality,” Nanci explained. “We began methodically tracking Hack Week projects in 2022 to address this and now use our Skill Exchange as a library to keep a close eye on projects that continue into development.” 

As for what the future of Hack Week at Spotify holds—we’ll leave that to the hackers to determine.

VP of Technology and Platforms Tyson Singer Shares How Developers Can Solve Complexity With Backstage

February 16, 2023

As Spotify’s VP of Technology and Platforms, Tyson Singer keeps a watchful and anticipatory eye on the company’s tech infrastructure. He focuses most on ensuring that our platform is always evolving behind the scenes—while still working for our users. He also makes sure that we’re at the forefront of tech innovation through effective long-term investments in areas like open source and sustainability. No small feats. 

His team’s most recent success is commercializing Backstage, a developer portal that Spotify created internally and then open-sourced in 2020. “Open-source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute it as they see fit,” Tyson explained to For the Record. “Opening up Backstage to the open-source community enabled external contributions that kept improving the tool, and the wide array of viewpoints made it an even more diverse platform for us and everyone using it.”

What does Backstage actually do? What is the problem it solves for enterprises? 

Backstage solves complexity—the kind of everyday complexity that can really bog engineers and their teams down, which then slows your whole organization down. Developers have access to more technologies than ever before, which comes with more responsibilities than ever before. Whether working at small or large companies, engineers use countless systems that all come with their own interfaces and ways of doing things. 

A Backstage developer portal puts everything in one place and is customized to whatever tools a company and individual developer team are using. So instead of switching between all these different tools and dashboards and systems, there’s just one front end for all of it — a single pane of glass. This unlocks speed, improved collaboration, or even just a smoother day. 

How did a company like Spotify come to create a tool for developers, and how has it evolved over time?

Years ago when Spotify was just starting to grow into the platform it is today, the software on the back end was becoming increasingly fragmented and complex. We needed to find a way to simplify the messy ecosystem and make it easier for developers to focus on what they do best: creating. It is central to our philosophy that happy developers make happy code.  

As I mentioned, we went on to open source it because it is fundamental to our entire platform, so we were incentivized to make the best product possible and make it the industry standard. It took off as an open-source tool and currently has over 700 adopters from companies like Netflix, Peloton, American Airlines, and more. 

In December, we took our first step into commercial software by selling a bundle of plugins to enhance the open-source version of Backstage. If you think of Backstage like your phone, then the plugins are like the apps—they are what make your phone more valuable and useful. We’re really excited about generating revenue that allows us to continue to invest in and support our open-source work. 

What are some innovative strides Spotify is making in technology and how does that align with our overall mission?

Spotify is obviously best known as the world’s largest audio-streaming platform, but that last part is often overlooked: platform. Our tech platform powers over 500 million creators with cutting-edge technology at a scale that is constantly growing. That means our engineers are building more, faster, while also making sure our platform continues to run smoothly. A core part of our company mission is to unlock human potential and creativity. Developers are creators—some of the most prolific creators, given that every company is now a technology company, and we’re really excited about the technologies we are building that empower them to do their best work. We plan to share more of those technologies so developers outside of Spotify can achieve the same experience. 

And finally, what’s on your “recently played”?

Mostly I listen to podcasts. One of my long-time favorites is Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy. I’m not a professional investor, but his guests often have very forward-looking and insightful views on technology and business. And I love his closing question, “What’s the kindest thing anyone has done for you?” as it reminds us and these successful folks that kindness and luck are a big part of success.  

Music-wise, my “recently played” is completely unpredictable, even to me. I thought when I checked I’d see Soundgarden, The Beatles, or Queen show up, but it was actually Norah Jones, Buena Vista Social Club, and Gipsy Kings. That’s the beauty of Spotify for me, there’s always great recommendations for every mood.  

Build the best developer portal possible with Backstage.